1. Field of the Invention
The present invention pertains to devices for requesting, retrieving and storing into an embedded electronic address book contact information, such as information that might be included on a business card. It is particularly applicable to handheld devices such as wireless telephones and wireless or standalone PDAs.
2. Description of the Related Art
For a long time, the most common way to share one's contact information with another person was to communicate the information orally or to give that other person a printed business card. In either case, the recipient typically had to manually write the information into an address book. This often would require significant effort and it was difficult to later make changes to the information (e.g., if the other person moved or changed telephone numbers). An alternative, if a business card had been received, would be for the recipient to merely place the card into the appropriate position in a mechanical rolodex for later retrieval. This solution required some effort, although perhaps not as much as copying all the necessary information into an address book. However, a particular drawback of using a rolodex is that typically it is relatively large device and thus is not very portable.
Both of the foregoing techniques had certain common limitations. For instance, each required a single type of sorting (usually alphabetical according to the contact's last name). In addition, neither option facilitated subsequent sharing or duplicating of the contact information, thus hindering efficient personal networking.
Technology has, to some extent, improved the way contact information is stored and accessed. The emergence of personal information managers (PIMs), such as Microsoft Outlook™, that include an electronic address book allow contact information records to be stored electronically and then searched and/or sorted in a number of different ways. In addition, because the storage is electronic it usually can be backed up relatively easily, and contact information for a single individual sometimes can be shared electronically, such as by emailing the information to another person.
It is noted that certain on-line telephone directories also are presently in use. Such directories permit a user to search for a listing, and then the listing is displayed to the user via a Web page. However, the provided contact information generally is not sufficiently formatted to permit automatic entry into the user's electronic address book. Thus, the end user generally is required to manually copy such information into his or her electronic address book if local storage is desired. Further limitations of such on-line directories include: (i) the information regarding the contact provided to the end user usually is quite limited in scope (e.g., typically only name, address and telephone number are provided); and (ii) modification of the contact information according to such systems typically is very cumbersome. Thus, such on-line directories usually are not well-suited to entering contact information into an electronic address book or to efficient sharing of contact information in general.